*
With sadness I returned to England and began a tour of the provinces. What a contrast to Paris! Those mournful Sunday evenings in northern towns: everything closed, and the doleful clang of reprimanding bells that accompanied carousing youths and giggling wenches parading the darkened high streets and back alleys. It was their only Sunday evening diversion.
Six months had drifted by in England and I had settled down to my usual routine, when news came from the London office that made life more exciting. Mr Karno informed me that I was to take the place of Harry Weldon in the second season of The Football Match. Now I felt that my star was in the ascendant. This was my chance. Although I had made a success in Mumming Birds and other sketches in our repertoire, those were minor achievements compared to playing the lead in The Football Match. Moreover, we were to open at the Oxford, the most important music hall in London. We were to be the main attraction and I was to have my name featured for the first time at the top of the bill. This was a considerable step up. If I were a success at the Oxford it would establish a kudos that would enable me to demand a large salary and eventually branch out with my own sketches, in fact it would lead to all sorts of wonderful schemes. As practically the same cast was engaged for The Football Match, we needed only a week’s rehearsal. I had thought a great deal about how to play the part. Harry Weldon had a Lancashire accent. I decided to play it as a cockney.
But at the first rehearsal I had an attack of laryngitis. I did everything to save my voice, speaking in whispers, inhaling vapours and spraying my throat, until anxiety robbed me of all unctuousness and comedy for the part.
On the opening night, every vein and cord in my throat was strained to the utmost with a vengeance. But I could not be heard. Karno came round afterwards with an expression of mingled disappointment and contempt. ‘No one could hear you,’ he said reprovingly. I assured him that my voice would be better the next night, but it was not. In fact it was worse, for it had been forced to such a degree that I was in danger of losing it completely. The next night my understudy went on. As a consequence the engagement finished after the first week. All my hopes and dreams of that Oxford engagement had collapsed, and the disappointment of it laid me low with influenza.
*
I had not seen Hetty in over a year. In a state of weakness and melancholy after the flu, I thought of her again and wandered late one night towards her home in Camberwell. But the house was empty with a sign: ‘To Let’.
I continued wandering the streets with no special objective. Suddenly out of the night a figure appeared, crossing the road and coming towards me.
‘Charlie! What are you doing up this way?’ It was Hetty. She was dressed in a black sealskin coat with a round sealskin hat.
‘I came to meet you,’ I said jokingly.
She smiled. ‘You’re very thin.’
I told her I had just recovered from flu. She was seventeen now, quite pretty and smartly dressed.
‘But the thing is, what are you doing up this way?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been visiting a friend and now I’m going to my brother’s house. Would you like to come along?’ she answered.
On the way, she told me that her sister had married an American millionaire, Frank J. Gould, and that they lived in Nice, and that she was leaving London in the morning to join them.
That evening I stood watching her dancing coquettishly with her brother. She was acting silly and siren-like with him, and in spite of myself I could not preclude a feeling that my ardour for her had slightly diminished. Had she become commonplace like any other girl? The thought saddened me, and I found myself looking at her objectively.
Her figure had developed, and I noticed the contours of her breasts and thought their protuberance small and not very alluring. Would I marry her even if I could afford to? No, I did not want to marry anyone.
As I walked home with her on that cold and brilliant night, I must have been sadly objective as I spoke about the possibility of her having a very wonderful and happy life. ‘You sound so wistful, I could almost weep,’ she said.
That night I went home feeling triumphant, for I had touched her with my sadness and had made my personality felt.
Karno put me back into Mumming Birds and, ironically, it was not more than a month before I completely recovered my voice. Great as my disappointment was about The Football Match, I tried not to dwell on it. But I was haunted by a thought that perhaps I was not equal to taking Weldon’s place. And behind it all was the ghost of my failure at the Foresters’. As I had not fully retrieved my confidence, every new sketch in which I played the leading comedy part was a trial of fear. And now the alarming and a most resolute day came to notify Mr Karno that my contract had run out and that I wanted a raise.
Karno could be cynical and cruel to anyone he disliked. Because he liked me I had never seen that side of him, but he could indeed be most crushing in a vulgar way. During a performance of one of his comedies, if he did not like a comedian, he would stand in the wings and hold his nose and give an audible raspberry. But he did this once too often
